The Challenges of Decentralized Social Networks: A Case Study of Bluesky’s Recent Outage
It turns out that decentralized social networks can go down, too. On Thursday evening, the decentralized social network Bluesky experienced a significant outage, leaving users unable to load the app on both the web and mobile devices for roughly an hour. According to a message on Bluesky’s status page, the company was aware of the outage, which it attributed to “Major PDS Networking Problems.” (PDS means personal data servers.)
The first status message was posted at 6:55 PM ET, and a second one indicating that a fix was being applied was shared soon after at 7:38 PM ET.
The question many may be asking now is, how did this decentralized social network go down? Isn’t it … decentralized? Isn’t one of the perks of decentralization that there’s not a single point of failure?
Despite the platform’s decentralized nature, the majority of Bluesky users today interact with the service via Bluesky’s official app, powered by the AT Protocol. While in theory, anyone can run the various parts of the infrastructure that make up the protocol, including PDS, relays, and other components, it’s still early days for the social network, so few have done so.
Those who did, however, were not impacted by the outage.
In time, the idea is that many communities will be built on Bluesky, some with their own infrastructure, moderation services, and even client applications. Eventually, the hope is that Bluesky will be one of many entities that run the infrastructure needed to support the growing number of applications built on the AT Protocol.
In the near term, however, an outage impacting Bluesky’s infrastructure will be felt more broadly.
The outage stirred up some of the rivalry between Bluesky and another decentralized social network, Mastodon, which runs on a different social networking protocol called ActivityPub. Mastodon users were quick to point to the outage in order to make jokes or jabs that focused on Bluesky’s approach to decentralization.
One Mastodon user, Luke Johnson, wrote, “see how the mighty Bluesky crumbles while the Raspberry Pi running Mastodon under my bed just keeps chugging along” — a reference to how Mastodon can run off even tiny machines users themselves configure.
Or, as another Mastodon user joked, “nice decentralization ya got there.”
In any event, Bluesky’s outage was resolved shortly after it began and the service is back up and running.
